Here's what! The whole thing got started from that rotgut instead of Clinquot - Democratization got started, the uproar and the Khovanshchinas. All your Ouspenskys, all your Pomialovskys - they couldn't write a line without a glass. I've read it, I know. They drank desperately. All the honest men of Russia. And why did they drink? They drank in desperation. They drank because they were honest, because they were not up to lightening the burden of the people. The people were suffocating in poverty and ignorance. Read Dmitry Pisarev. He writes the same thing: The people cannot permit themselves beef, but vodka is cheaper than beef, so the Russian peasant drinks because of his poverty. They cannot permit themselves a book, because at the marketplace there is neither Gogol nor Belinsky - just vodka, both government vodka and other kinds, and from the barrel, and to take home. Therefore he drinks, because of his ignorance he drinks.
How is one not to give way to despair, how not to write about the muzhik, how not to want to save him, how not to drink from despair? The Social Democrat writes books and drinks, he drinks as well as he writes. But the muzhik does not read and drink, he drinks without reading. Then Ospensky gets up and hangs himself and Pomialovsky lies down under a bench in a tavern and breathes his last and Garshin gets up and, dead drunk, throws himself over the railing...